University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2012 Circling Back Home: A Lifelong Odyssey into Feminism Scott Leslie eumeiN ster University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Scholar Commons Citation Neumeister, Scott Leslie, "Circling Back Home: A Lifelong Odyssey into Feminism" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4378 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Circling Back Home: A Lifelong Odyssey into Feminism by Scott Neumeister A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Gary L. Lemons, Ph.D. Sara Munson Deats, Ph.D. Lawrence R. Broer, Ph.D. Diane Price Herndl, Ph.D. Date of Approval: November 16, 2012 Keywords: Homer, pedagogy, hooks, middle school, critical consciousness Copyright © 2012, Scott Neumeister Acknowledgments I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the University of South Florida professors who fostered my journey into feminism, all of whom graciously serve on this thesis’s committee. Dr. Sara Munson Deats, as the interim Director of Graduate Studies, enthusiastically encouraged me to begin my master’s program, despite my relatively late start in life, and as a professor gave me the first piece of feminist criticism I had ever read in my life. Dr. Larry Broer both provided me a backstage tour of the “theaters of masculinity” and maintained a relationship with me after his class that culminated in my assisting him on his latest book. Dr. Diane Price Herndl, as well as her husband Carl, assisted me in exploring the deepest critical theorists without losing touch with the real world, and reinforced the teacher-student relationship with a personal one. Foremost, however, I am mostly deeply thankful to Dr. Gary Lemons for a mentorship and a kinship beyond any I have experienced in my life. Not without understanding the implications of the sobriquet do I call him “Brother of the Soul,” since to name one of a different race as brother, as well as erasing the hierarchy of professor and student, breaks the tyranny of the visual and social constructions in which we live. He has never failed to keep me inspired, and in Spirit, since our first meeting in 2009. Just as in The Odyssey Athena took on the form and voice of a man, Mentor, from which we get the word, so I believe that, for me, Dr. Lemons embodies the wisdom of feminism and will continue to be my guide, whether present or apart, for the rest of my lifelong odyssey. Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction: Tracing the Circle: Departure, Initiation, and Return 1 Chapter One: Patriarchal Training Grounds: Processing My World via Homer 5 Of Heart and Heroes: Hector’s Loving Patriarchy 9 Of Metis and Men: Odysseus’s Crafty Hegemony 16 A Maverick’s Heart: Rooting for the Underdog 20 Chapter Two: Encounter with the Goddess 24 The Inner Odyssey: Goddess-Guided Self-Reflection 28 The Mentor’s Mentors: Key Figures in the Pantheon 30 Chapter Three: The Beggar-King: Facing Hegemonic Suitors in the Classroom 37 Sneaking In: A Cautious Feminism and The Iliad 38 Gaining Confidence: Teaching The Odyssey and Feeling Boldness 43 Chapter Four: Putting It to the Proof: Unmasked (and Unmasking) Dialogue 47 Methods of Masculinity: How Manly Are Homer’s Men? 49 Notions of Nobility: The Class Discusses Class 53 Suspicions of Strangers: Interrogating Racism in the Xenophobe 56 Telling Tales: Interweaving Personal Narrative with Critique 59 This Journey’s Close: Ending with a Boon 66 Epilogue: The Ongoing Odyssey: Boundless Labor 69 Works Cited 73 i Abstract What happens when a classroom becomes more than just a site of intellectual growth and evolves into a locus of emotional, social, and spiritual transformation? What happens when a student in such a classroom also occupies the role of teacher and desires to reproduce such a transformative environment for his students? In brief, this thesis answers these questions by offering a narrative and critique of my personal “conscientization” via feminism and elucidates the theory behind, my approaches toward, and the results of my bringing graduate-level feminist theory and pedagogy to a middle school English classroom. I examine how my experiences as a student in both the past and the present have merged to shape my work as a teacher and have set me on the path to becoming a professor, not only in the sense of a college teacher as a profession but as a person who professes, who openly declares the truths of my past as both dehumanizer and dehumanized to help others come to critical consciousness. First, I autobiographically critique my learning and assimilation of The Iliad and The Odyssey in middle school, reflecting upon how these works occupied a major part of my indoctrination into the hyper-masculine, white, patriarchal, upper-class dogma of the culture, as well as bringing a feminist perspective to bear upon these personally influential epics. Next, I examine my studies in the University of South Florida’s master’s program in English literature and, in particular, my direct and life-changing encounter with feminism in a 2009 course in feminist theory, which facilitated a complete re- visioning of my life and led to a personal renaissance. The final part of this circular path leads me back to my teaching of the same classical texts that so greatly influenced me as a young man, and I explain how my transformative experiences with both feminist ii theory and pedagogy motivated me to distill their critical approaches into a form and format that I have successfully implemented for my middle-school classroom. iii Introduction Tracing the Circle: Departure, Initiation, and Return “…home, community, and identity all fit somewhere between the histories and experiences we inherit and the political choices we make through alliances, solidarities, and friendships” – Chandra Talpade Mohanty (136) “And even if you escape, you’ll come home late and come a broken man” – Homer (Odyssey 11.129-30) Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic The Odyssey, I have returned home after a long absence. Although my circular journey took a few years more than his, and I did not leave as a ruler nor fight a physical war, my odyssey also had conflicts and numerous obstacles. Just as Odysseus returns to his homeland, Ithaca, I have circled back to my native ground, the educational environment that occupied ten years of my youth and influenced me in innumerable ways. My life path has given me the opportunity to come home to a critical time and place, the single most momentous academic year of my life and the selfsame school where it happened: the seventh grade at St. John’s Episcopal School in South Tampa. I also have come home “a broken man,” but not the kind of “broken” that connotes ruined or inoperative. In fact, one aspect of my being broken (the sort that Hector, breaker of horses, practiced) began in the very school to which I return. I subjugated myself to the yoke of the white, male, middle/upper class values of my society. Conversely, I now have performed another version of breaking, a severing of 1 agreements with the tyranny of those “political choices,” in Chandra Mohanty’s terminology, which I made starting over three decades ago. Although I arrive back in the capacity of teacher of literature at St. John’s, I do not wish for the metaphor of me as Odysseus the king to apply too strongly to me in my classroom. I intend, in truth, for my teaching not only to deconstruct patriarchy, classism, and racism but also to construct a new “Ithaca” for those I teach, a point of origin for their odysseys that helps them explore, decry, and resist their own “breaking” while they still remain young. When Odysseus lands in Ithaca after a twenty year absence, the goddess Athena transforms him into the guise of beggar, so that he may scout his own house undetected and gauge the strength of the suitors who plague his wife, Penelope. Indeed I might primarily link myself metaphorically to the regal Odysseus because I hold the position of a type of “beggar-king,” simultaneously occupying two, seemingly opposing roles – that of teacher and that of student. During my master’s studies in English literature at the University of South Florida, my pupillary encounter with feminism has radically altered my perspective on the world and caused a paradigm shift in my perceptions of the past, my actions in the present, and in my goals for the future. I specifically wish to use this thesis to examine how my experiences as a student, both past and present, have merged to shape me as a human and informed my work as a teacher, setting me on the path to becoming a professor, not only in the sense of a college teacher as a profession but as a person who professes, who openly declares my experiences as both dehumanizer and dehumanized. This thesis narrates and critiques my own transformation by the “goddess” of feminism (my “conscientization,” as Freire would term it) and to elucidate the theory behind, my methods of, and results from teaching feminism in a middle school English classroom.